The UniLodz scholar demonstrates that the historical narrative of Davies, author of numerous works on the history of Europe, Poland and the British Isles, is also a geographical narrative. This conclusion concerns not only the past: to understand today’s world, we must stop thinking about it as a collection of permanent structures.
Moorland Above Bolton
Norman Davies was in his teens when he would sit on the slopes of Winter Hill overlooking his native Bolton and watch the rising sun illuminate the valleys of England’s mountainous backbone. Years later, he wrote in “Beneath Another Sky: A Global Journey into History” that there could be no better place to discover one’s own position in time and space, and that it lay just beyond his doorstep.
In the autobiographical work “The Games of History: A Historian's Struggle” with the Past, Davies recalls a geography teacher and French textbooks in which history and geography were treated as equal disciplines. He mentions Paul Vidal de la Blache, the founder of classical human geography and one of the inspirations behind the Annales School.
It is precisely this thread that Prof. dr hab. Marcin Wójcik, Associate Professor at the University of Lodz, from the Department of Regional and Social Geography, Dean of the Faculty of Geographical Sciences, follows in his publication.
The question of how much geography there is in history accompanied me throughout my work on the article. It turned out that, for Davies, space is not merely scenery. It is often the driving force behind events
– says the UniLodz researcher.
A Coastline the Length of the Equator
The British historian emphasises the immense geographical diversity of Europe. The ratio of coastline length to land area is exceptionally high here, with around 37,000 kilometres of land-sea boundary, almost exactly the length of the Equator. For prehistoric people, the historian argued, this was probably the most important measure of accessibility.
The same applies to Poland. Many readers of Davies’s bestselling “God’s Playground” are familiar with the notion of geography as a causal factor, even a “culprit”, in Polish history. What is less often remembered is that the author immediately complicates and relativises this claim: the same openness that exposed the country to pressure from its neighbours also facilitated movement, transit and settlement.
Permanence and Movement
This is where the analysis turns into a reflection on the present day. Davies challenges what appears obvious. Borders were often fluid, and power radiated from centres. The inhabitants of peripheral areas were drawn first in one direction and then another, much like iron filings in a changing magnetic field. The centre of Europe? Many nations can point to a location they regard as such, and each of these claims is equally legitimate. Wrocław, to which the British scholar devoted one of his works, is a mosaic of historical legacies, and to understand it, one must symbolically place the centre of Europe there. The city’s enduring characteristic has not been permanence but change: demographic, cultural and linguistic.
– Nature operates according to an entirely different rhythm from politics. Landforms, river systems and coastlines create enduring realities that remain unaffected by changing states and borders. This is very much Fernand Braudel’s concept of the longue durée: beneath the surface of events lie structures that evolve over centuries – explains Prof. dr hab. Marcin Wójcik, Associate Professor at the University of Lodz. – And this is where the misunderstanding lies. What is enduring are natural systems and patterns of movement, not the divisions we impose upon them. If we want to understand the world we live in, we must move beyond a focus on structures considered permanent, including those by which we divide social, cultural and political space. They are our ways of organising the world, not the world itself. We confuse them far too often.
Geography Is Not Destiny
These reflections, together with the realisation of the inevitability of change within enduring geographical space, are particularly important today, as that space has once again become a field of tensions, political, cultural and ecological. Borders once thought to be disappearing have returned as lines of conflict, while regional diversity is increasingly interpreted not as an asset but as a threat.
The article “How Much Geography Is There in History? Norman Davies and the Spatial Dimension of Historical Narrative” will be published in Geographia Polonica (2027), issued by the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The text will be available in open access. DOI: 10.7163/GPol.0329.
Source: Prof. dr hab. Marcin Wójcik, Associate Professor at the University of Lodz, Faculty of Geographical Sciences, marcin.wojcik@geo.uni.lodz.pl
Edit: Press Office
